WhatsApp Business has grown to over 200 million monthly users over the past few years. That means there are tons of businesses sending messages to users — and some of these messages could be considered as spam. For customers, the only option was to either let them send messages and offers, or block the business account altogether. WhatsApp is finally changing that.
The company is now testing new ways for users to provide feedback to businesses about what kind of messages they would want to receive — or not receive. This involves buttons like “interested/not interested” and “stop/resume” for some specific categories of messages.
Meta said it will begin testing interactions globally. For example, in the screenshot below, users can indicate whether they are interested (or not interested) in receiving “offers and announcements”. They can also choose to stop receiving this type of message altogether. In the future, users will have the option to resume messages if they wish to receive offers from a brand during a festive season.
Businesses can send messages through WhatsApp’s API based on one of these four categories: marketing (offers, new products), utility (order updates, account balance), authentication (one-time passwords) and service (customer inquiries).
While these categories exist in the backend, there was previously no way for customers to stop one type of message while continuing to receive others. For instance, you might want to receive purchase updates and authentication codes from an e-commerce site, but if you weren’t interested in marketing messages, you didn’t have the option to provide that feedback manually.
In countries like India and Brazil, a phone number attached to WhatsApp is the primary communication channel for many users, unlike email. While on email, you get an option to unsubscribe from promotional emails, there weren’t such indicators on WhatsApp. This resulted in users being overwhelmed by spammy business messages.
The company has been considering introducing new controls for business messaging. In a conversation with TechCrunch in September on the sidelines of a WhatsApp Business event in India, Nikila Srinivasan, VP of product management for messaging monetization at Meta, hinted at this feature.
“One important thing we do is to give you transparency that you are interacting and engaging with businesses. Two, if you don’t want to interact with them, the strongest signal you can send is to block them and report them. This helps us understand that this is not a business you want on the platform. In addition to that, we are starting to think about how we can give more preferences to users to express more granularity,” she said.
Srinivasan also mentioned that educating businesses and helping them understand how some of their campaigns are not meeting the platform or users’ standards will eventually reduce spam.
Earlier this year, the company started restricting the number of marketing messages a person can receive in a day without explicitly defining the limit.
For a long time, WhatsApp marketed itself as a place for people to have personal conversations. Over the last few years, the company has introduced features to build and join communities, to broadcast messages as a creator or publisher, and, for businesses, to communicate directly with customers. Both communities and broadcast channels have their own tabs in the app.
However, business communication still shows up in the main chat inbox, and there is no way to filter it. In its Q3 2024 quarterly call, the company indicated that the WhatsApp Business platform is a key growth driver for its family of other apps revenue, which raked in $434 million in the quarter. The company will need to find a balance between making money and not alienating core WhatsApp users by bombarding them with business messages.
When we asked about this balance to Srinivasan along with possibility of creating a separate place for business messages, she pointed out that several of the newer WhatsApp features are optional and separate from the main inbox.
“The core of what you want to do with WhatsApp is to be in your inbox. When I think about whether we would create a separate experience for businesses, I really love the inspiration that we have for helping businesses. Whatever we are doing in terms of educating businesses and investing in user controls is because we want the standard of what actually belongs in your inbox to feel really high,” she said.
You can contact this reporter at [email protected] or on Signal: @ivan.42
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Social media platform Reddit experienced an outage this afternoon at around 12:20 p.m. PT (or possibly even earlier), resulting in thousands of users being unable to access its website and app. After four hours, it appears to be working again.
Reddit confirmed it fixed the issue and is monitoring the results, according to its status page.
We discovered the outage ourselves when attempting to visit the homepage, which displayed a black screen with the message: “Upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. Reset reason: connection failure.” On the iOS app, we only saw the dead Snoo head, Reddit’s alien mascot.
Over 47,000 users reported problems on Downdetector.com and many users took to X to voice their complaints, sharing images of the same connection error page that we encountered.
TechCrunch has reached out to the company for comment.
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Social media platform Reddit is experiencing an outage this afternoon, resulting in thousands of users being unable to access its website and app. Reddit confirmed that it’s currently investigating the issue, according to its status page.
We discovered the outage ourselves when attempting to visit the homepage, which displayed a black screen with the message: “Upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. Reset reason: connection failure.” On the iOS app, we only saw the dead Snoo head, Reddit’s alien mascot.
The outage has been ongoing since at least 12:20 p.m. PT, with over 47,000 users reporting problems on Downdetector.com. Many users have also taken to X to voice their complaints, sharing images of the same connection error page that we encountered.
TechCrunch has reached out to the company for comment and will provide updates once the issue is resolved.
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Meta is introducing new features for Messenger, its messaging app, including AI-powered noise suppression.
Messenger is getting HD video calls and voice isolation, both of which can be enabled via the call settings menu. HD calls are now the default for calls placed over Wi-Fi, Meta says, and an option for calls over cellular.
Messenger also now lets you leave audio or video voice messages when contacts aren’t available, like a digital voicemail. When someone doesn’t answer a call, you can tap the new “Record message” button to send an audio or video recording.
There’s new Siri integration. On iOS, you can ask Siri to help make calls and messages by asking something like “Hey Siri, send a message to Cassandra on Messenger” and then dictating what that message will be.
Lastly, Meta launched AI backgrounds for video calls, which it previewed earlier in the year. Soon, Meta says, you’ll be able to create AI-generated backgrounds by tapping the “effects” icon in the sidebar during Messenger video calls and selecting “Backgrounds.”
The updates to Messenger come after Meta rolled out a new communities feature for the app, built its Meta AI chatbot into the Messenger search bar, an added tools to share large files. Toward the end of last year, Meta also made end-to-end encryption the default for Messenger conversations.
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As X competitor Bluesky takes off, topping 20 million users, Meta’s own Twitter-like app, Instagram Threads, has begun rolling out a new feature called custom feeds to its global audience. Hoping to capitalize on user demand for more personalization, custom feeds are meant to allow Threads users to easily build feeds around specific topics or those including certain user profiles.
This would make it easier for Threads users to tap into the communities and conversations that are most important to them and could help to challenge Bluesky’s own set of tools for personalization, including those that let users build their own algorithms, feeds, and lists, as well as those that let them configure their own moderation tools.
The global launch of custom feeds on Threads comes only days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the feature was entering testing. That signals that Threads is moving quickly to topple some of the momentum that Bluesky has recently seen. Since the U.S. elections, Bluesky adoption has soared as users looked for an alternative to the now more right-leaning X, owned by Elon Musk. Other decisions at X have also pushed people to depart, including how it has changed the block feature and its policy around training AI models on user data.
As a result, Bluesky has significantly grown its user base from around 7 million users just a couple of months ago to now north of 20 million.
But Threads retains the lead among the X competitors, with more than 275 million monthly users, largely thanks to its ability to jump-start its network by leveraging Instagram’s social graph and integrations with Meta’s other apps. However, some users on Threads have been disappointed by its decision to deprioritize politics, and have asked for other options beyond the default algorithmic “For You” feed and the chronological “Following” feed.
That’s where custom feeds come in.
To use the feature, you’ll first need to search for and then tap into a topic to see the latest posts. From there, you’ll tap on the three-dot icon next to the search term and choose the option “create new feed.” You can also choose to add specific user profiles to a feed by visiting the user’s profile, tapping the three-dot icon above their profile photo, and then tapping to add them to one of your feeds.
After the feeds are created, they can be pinned to the top of the Threads’ home screen on the web in the columns-based view (similar to Twitter’s Tweetdeck or X Pro), making them easier to access.
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TV Time, a popular TV and movie tracking and recommendations app with more than 30 million registered users, disappeared from Apple’s App Store for several weeks, leading to questions about its future from the app’s avid fan base. Considering that 2.5 million users use the app every month to track what they’re watching and to engage in a social network where they can comment on individual episodes, vote for favorite characters, post images and GIFs, and connect with other users, its disappearance didn’t go unnoticed.
On November 1, the company announced via a post on X that it was aware the app had been removed from the App Store and that it was “working with Apple to get it back ASAP.” It offered no other details as to what may have caused the app to be pulled or how soon it could return. Users continually reply to that post in hopes of an update, but unfortunately for TV Time fans, several weeks passed without a resolution.
After TechCrunch reached out to TV Time and Apple about the app’s removal, the app was reinstated on the App Store.
TV Time has long been operated by entertainment analytics platform Whip Media Group following its acquisition in 2016 of the French startup, formerly known as TVShow Time. Similar to other services like Reelgood or JustWatch, the app can direct users to where a show or movie can be streamed and can suggest other series you might like, based on your viewing activity.
During the time of its removal, existing iOS users were still able to access the app on their devices, but anyone trying to install TV Time on a new iPhone or iPad would have been out of luck. In addition, the App Store removal meant TV Time was no longer able to issue updates to its app to its current user base.
TechCrunch reached out to the company to find out why the app was pulled.
According to Whip Media Chief Marketing Officer Jerry Inman, the dispute with Apple had to do with the mishandling of a routine intellectual property (IP) complaint. TV Time users had uploaded some TV and film cover art to the app, leading a company to claim copyrights over the app and issue a takedown notice via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). While TV Time complies with the DMCA, it asked the complainant to provide proof of ownership — like a copyright registration — which it was unable to do. Despite the lack of evidence, TV Time says it still removed the images from both the TV Time platform and its metadata platform, TheTVDB.
However, the complainant also demanded a financial settlement not consistent with the DMCA so Whip Media did not agree to pay, Inman claims.
“Despite Whip Media having complied with the DMCA and explaining that to Apple, the complainant notified Apple that its claim was ‘unresolved,’ and Apple decided to remove TV Time from the App Store,” he says. The company has since resolved the matter with the complainant. As of the time of writing, the TV Time app was in the process of returning to the App Store.
However, Inman warns this is another case where Apple had too much power over the companies doing business on its App Store platform.
“Apple holds significant power over app developers by controlling access to a massive market and, in this case, seems to have acted on a complaint without requiring robust evidence from the complainant,” Inman shared with TechCrunch.
Apple was asked for comment and did not respond.
While TV Time was missing from the App Store, fans could use the app on Android and the web at app.tvtime.com. According to data from app intelligence firm Appfigures, TV Time has seen 7.4 million installs on iOS to date since Appfigures’ tracking system began, on Jan. 1, 2017. (The app itself first launched in 2012).
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